First Gatwick. Now a film about a serial killer drone. We have been warned

If the events of late 2018 taught us anything, it’s that we all now cower beneath the shadow of a widespread drone menace. Look at the Gatwick fiasco. Either an entire airport was closed because of a drone, or an entire airport was closed by the hypothetical possibility of a drone, which is worse. Just the idea that there might potentially be a drone nearby can send people into floods of desperate panic.

And now, to reflect an issue destined to plague 2019, comes The Drone. It’s a forthcoming horror film about a drone. And we should explore The Drone’s trailer, because it is only by understanding true fear that we can hope to overcome it.

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The trailer begins with a montage of everything good that technology has ever brought us. Easy access to information. Aviation. Space flight. A way to record and capture precious memories. Life-saving medicine. And yet there’s something uneasy about this montage, a growing sense that the makers of The Drone are about to expose the dark underbelly of technology. Whatever’s coming next, I guarantee that it’ll make you sick to your stomach.

And here it is. A drone on a rocking chair. Have you ever seen anything so sinister? Look at it, rocking backwards and forwards while its propellers whirr with a haunted hum. This is the future we have created for ourselves, and we only have ourselves to blame.

According to the accompanying literature, The Drone is a film about a consumer drone that becomes possessed by the spirit of a serial killer. How on earth could we as a society allow such a thing to happen? It’s unconscionable that big tech firms have the ability to allow simple remote-controlled toys to absorb the personality of anybody, let alone a violent criminal who – at least judging by this still – is apparently a bit of a creep. Letters must be written.

It’s bad enough that this serial killer drone is able to spy on precious moments of intimacy, but look at the right-hand side. It has identified an act as ‘human coitus’ in text, just like RoboCop does. Who built this function into the drone’s software? Why?

This is where things get really terrifying. Not only does the drone have the capacity to behave in a sexualised manner, but it can also identify people, find images of those people, assemble those images on a wall in a horrifying tableau, source fresh blood from somewhere, and then write words such as “kill” and “die” on that tableau with the same blood. This might sound controversial, but I don’t think that consumer drones need to be able to do any of that. People buy drones because they want to see what the top of their house looks like, not because they want to create a visually elaborate threat for people they eventually intend to murder. At the very least, this function shouldn’t be automated.

See? This is what happens when you let technology run wild. A policeman gets covered in blood in a bathroom. Anyone could have seen this coming.

This too. Somehow the drone has taken control of a car. What a wake-up call this trailer is. We must all watch The Drone multiple times when it is released, to learn and understand all of its warnings.

The trailer ends with the starkest warning of all. A drone, it is heavily implied, might be able to literally perform sex acts on your partner. It’s sickening. Please, do me a favour. If you happen to see a drone on the street today, I want you to punch it right in its face. Drones are instruments of pure evil. Thanks to The Drone, I can see that now.